The present invention refers to a dot matrix printing device particularly useful in electronic calculators for printing the digits of an amount and related explanatory symbols.
A printing device is known for electronic calculators comprising a thermal printing head having a row of equally spaced electrically heatable printing elements, each of which prints the dots of two digits or explanatory symbols of an amount. Moreover, in order to easily distinguish digits from symbols, these are printed leaving a blank roughly equal to space occupied by a digit between them. Such known printing device prints easily readable amounts at a relatively low cost. However, to obtain these results, the printing elements adjacent to that used to print the two explanatory symbols is used only for printing the least significant digit of an amount because of the need, as mentioned above, to leave a space between digits and symbols.